Cautionary Tales by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Caution: instructive essay

11. Editing

As I see it, there are two main aspects to writing a novel, and a number of sub-aspects. The main ones are Writing it and Marketing it. I love to write, but hate to market. That’s why I use a literary agent. (No, you can’t have one; that’s a whole ’nother subject.) The cards are stacked against the new writer, so that no matter how great his (that’s the generic his, meaning his, hers, and its) novel is, chances are it will never be commercially published. That’s just the beginning of why I hate marketing.

But this is not about that. It’s about the Editing part of Writing. It seems that many writers hate to edit. I don’t understand that. I love to edit my own work. I find it easier to polish an existing manuscript than to create it. But of course I’ve been at it since 1954 when I realized in college that my dream was to be a writer. I suspect I have learned something about the process in that intervening half century. If you had been at it that long you would find it easier too. The first years are the hardest, and that’s where you are now.

So let’s see if I can get into your skin. You have bashed out a 50,000-word effort in a month or so, responding to a foolish creative challenge, and now you’re stuck with this obscene lump of verbiage that you half-wish you could bury six miles deep. But that would mean admitting that you are a failure, that you have no talent, and that your mother-in-law or other frightful authority figure was right about you all along. That’s too much to choke down at the moment. It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong, but that you’ll be darned if you’ll give them the satisfaction. So somehow you have to grind this thing into shape so that it doesn’t reek too loudly of month-old cabbage. Great literature is too much to expect, but at least let it somehow achieve the illusion of average.

And that is what you hate: trying to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse. You would rather slog through the six-inch-deep muck in an over-endowed pigpen in your bare feet. How can anyone in his right mind, or any mind at all, actually enjoy this feculent process? (Editorial note: “feculent” means full of feces; it stinks.)

Uh, I suspect you are giving yourself too little credit. What you really have is a diamond in the rough. Have you seen one of those, physically? It looks like a pocked fragment of rock from the bottom of a polluted stream. But when it is faceted and polished, its inherent glory shines forth. Face it: If you can Write it, you can Edit it. You just happen to need a different approach.

There are two types of personality involved in writing. Remember the famous story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert L Stevenson? Where one was nice and the other nasty, but both used the same body? These two entities exist in you, too.

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